Chapter 4: Reflections
..
Defeated, I concede and
Move closer
I may find comfort here
I may find peace within the emptiness, how pitiful
..
Valerie glared at herself in the mirror. Her sixteen year old face was contorted in frustration and pain, one of her eyes puffy and bruised. Her hair billowed over her shoulders, tangled and blown out. She hadn't even ran a brush through it today.
In her mind she could hear the screams of people running away in panic. Because she wasn't there to stop Phantom. Because she got sloppy and got herself hurt. Stupid.
She tore her rotator cuff so bad they had to do surgery on it. She'd spend weeks laid up, taking shots to minimize the damage and doing physical therapy. She had weeks, but the people outside the Shield didn't. She couldn't do anything, or she'd risk doing permanent damage to her shoulder. Her life was spinning out of control.
Her glare only deepened, her reflection responding in kind.
Her shoulder started to throb just from thinking about it. It hurt so bad even with the pain medication that the doctors proscribed her. Not only did it not seem to work but it made her feel strange, like she wasn't really there, like she was just floating a foot above her body. It was hard to think.
A lock of her hair fell into her face and she angrily pushed it away with her hand. She made a startled noise as she accidentally brushed tender skin around her eye.
As the shock and pain subsided, anger welled up inside her, the unfortunate victim being her hair. Regardless of its inability of blame, she'd make it pay. She pulled out a pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet and hacked off the first piece, the original offender, then she cut off another and another.
When her rage finally subsided, she looked at herself in the mirror again. With curly hair you could usually hide uneven hair ends, but what she did was just an absolute hack job. She looked like a half shorn sheep, crossed with a troll doll. She let out a laugh. What the hell was she? Some chick from a teen romance novel that just got dumped? No, she just got irrationally angry at her hair, which while still irrational, was less so than cutting her hair because of a boy.
Then again, Phantom, though a ghost, was definitely still a boy. And he indirectly caused her to attack her hair. Well, it was a reach, but the thought still coaxed another laugh out of her.
She caught another glance at herself and continued laughing, eventually becoming consumed in giggles. Her laughter morphed into sobs somewhere along the way, and she covered her face with her hands, careless of her black eye.
Suddenly, there was a knock on the bathroom door. "Valerie, are you alright, sweetheart?" her dad asked.
She froze. She tried to say something, but her vocal cords were paralyzed as well.
There was a pause, and then he said, "I'm coming in."
She jumped as the notoriously squeaky door creeped open. Her dad stood in the doorway, left sleeve hanging loose like it had for the past two years. He looked at her surprised, then to the hair all over the counter and in the sink.
Valerie was suddenly released from her petrified state and looked away sheepishly, brushing tears from her face. She winced as she pressed to hard on her bruised eye. What was she gonna do now? Cut out her tear ducts like she did with her hair?
She saw her dad grimace in the mirror. "If you wanted to get your hair cut, sweetie, you could have just told me."
She let out a laugh, even though his statement wasn't really funny.
She brushed a short lock out of her face, only for it to fall right back where it had been. It was too short to tuck behind her ear now. "It got in my...eyes" Valerie said in a watery voice. "It still kinda does."
He gave her a smile and shrugged. "Well, do you want to use my clippers?"
...
The room was about the size of a closet, and yet supposedly two people had fit in there. And two metal framed beds were indeed crammed in there a little less than a meter apart. Even though it was small, anytime either Dan or Valerie made any amount of noise, it echoed loudly on the walls, which were a stark white and lacked any personal effects.
Dan sniffed haughtily. "You people live like this? There's not even a bathroom."
"Bathroom's down the hall—not that I'd imagine you would need it," Valerie said.
"Please, tell me that you don't live in one of these," Dan said dryly. "You don't actually live here, right?"
"Well, me and my dad mostly lived out of...FentonWorks before you, you know, completely destroyed it."
Dan made a face. "My old house? Really?"
Valerie raised an eyebrow. "Yes, 'really'. It was easiest monitor the dome and the portal if we were always right next to it. We have recruits camping out in the ruins now to make sure the portal doesn't go nuclear."
Dan cast another disdainful look around the dormitory. "Still, you couldn't find anywhere else than this?"
"Its not like we can't put up decorations and things like that. It's just spartan because we took down all of A and D's stuff."
"That reminds me, I can't stay in here, Valerie. What if I get haunted?" he said with a martyred expression.
Valerie scoffed. "A ghost getting haunted. Sure."
Dan shrugged. "It could happen."
He sat down on the bed. "But I'd just kill them again if they did come back as ghosts, anyway."
Valerie's expression darkened. He should stop—he knew he should. Eventually, he'd reach her breaking point, and he would really pay then. But until that moment he'd just keep pushing, because he just couldn't help himself. Maybe a masochistic part of him wanted her to break and really hurt him, or he just had no impulse control. It was probably a little bit of both.
He gave Valerie scornful smile. "Wouldn't I be doing you a favor, Valerie dear? Since you hate ghosts so much. The thought of your friends coming back as them...how terrible would that be? Better just to put them out of their misery, right?"
"Shut up," she hissed through clenched jaws.
Dan felt the block in his throat again, and sighed.
"What the hell is wrong with you? Are you just incapable of going half an hour without saying some genuinely terrible shit?"
He shrugged with a blasé expression.
She sighed and ran a hand down her face. "You can talk again."
"Thanks," he deadpanned.
She rolled her eyes and looked at her watch. She let out a quiet curse when she saw what it read.
"I have to go on patrol. Stay here and don't destroy anything."
"You're just going to leave me here with nothing to do?" Dan complained.
"Twiddle your thumbs, stare at a wall, I don't care. Do whatever you do when you're not razing towns."
Dan tutted and leaned back on the bed, making it creek under his weight. "Alright, but if you come back, knock before entering the room."
Valerie frowned before realization dawned on her. Her face twisted in disgust. "I'm leaving now."
Dan chuckled as she left, but sobered as soon as the door was closed. He listened for her footsteps to fade down the hall before standing and going to the door. He made his hand intangible—and invisible since he had noticed cameras in the halls—and tried to phase it through the door. A sharp pain pierced his temples as soon as his fingers breached the other side of the door, and he quickly retracted his hand.
He sighed. "End of control test," he muttered dryly to himself.
He made a duplicate of himself and had a mental start when he saw that it also wore his human illusion. He looked away in a strange sort of self-consciousness.
Dan watched out of the corner of his eye as his doppelgänger went to phase through the wall. He was expecting to receive the typical warning jolt of pain like before, but as the doppelgänger tried to phase through the wall, it almost instantly dissolved. As it returned back to Dan, he nearly doubled and placed a hand to his head. The pain lasted for several agonizing seconds before letting him go.
"Damn it," he panted.
He began to pace like a caged animal. Someway, some small way he had to find to disobey Valerie. If he could just fine some small way to disobey her, he could find a way to break free.
He turned to the bed, grabbing the top sheet, not even to rip it, just to unmake the bed. But he found that he couldn't even do that. Just from bunching the sheets in his fists, he received a jolt of pain. Gritting his teeth, he tried to force his muscles to work, but he had as much success as he did the last time. The pain only grew around his head until he let go of the sheets.
He straightened and formed an ectoblast in his hand. If the crown wouldn't even allow him to ruin the made bed then it certainly wouldn't allow him to discharge an ectoblast in the room, and he knew that at the back of his mind. But he didn't care.
Dan held out his arm, the energy building at the center of his palm. The pain started up again. His arm began to shake as he channeled more and more energy into the blast, and the headache increasing alongside, until there was a final intense jolt like two white hot iron spikes had been driven through his temples.
Dan clutched his head and staggered back. His knees bumped into the bed, and he virtually collapsed onto it. He sat bent over clutching his head for several minutes as pain ebbed slowly. It didn't just dissipate instantly like the last couple times as if the crown was warning him that it would only get worse if he continued to test it.
As the headache lessened to the point he could think again, every curse and insult towards Valerie and Clockwork he could possibly think of ran through his mind. Finally, as the pain died out completely, his rage petered out and was replaced with exasperated despondency.
He flopped back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling.
"Fuck."
Against his will, his mind began to wander, and of course the first thing his mind went to was the predicament he now found himself in.
What was he going to do?
He snorted at the thought. Well, evidently, be pushed around by Valerie. There was no apparent way out of that. Just thinking about it started to make him angry again, but it faded quickly. It could be worse, he reasoned. He could be forced to serve Clockwork. At least Valerie was fun to mess with.
But what was she going to do with him? Was she going to make him do public service or something? Like work at a soup kitchen? Or pick up trash in the park with one of those sharp pole-stick things? What were those called?
No, Valerie probably wouldn't let him near anything that could possibly be a weapon. Soup kitchen it was then.
He chuckled hollowly. He would do it obviously, but the thought of him being around a bunch of people all the time and expected to behave was ridiculous to him. If Valerie did put him in a position like that, he would find some way to screw it up.
Or maybe she'd make him do hard labor out in the fields working the lands. Honestly, he'd prefer that. It'd at least be less people to deal with.
But was that really all Valerie and Clockwork had in store of him? Menial labor? Maybe they just wanted to see him suffer. However, as much as Dan taunted her over it, and as much as she liked to pretend, he knew that wasn't her style. And what was the point of the deal in the first place if it wasn't to intact some sort of revenge? Was it some futile attempt to reform him? They'd have to be insane it they seriously thought that was possible.
Dan sighed and closed his eyes.
How long had it been since she left? Twenty minutes at most. He groaned and rolled over on his stomach. This was going to be a long night.
...
Valerie sat back on her hover board. She had it set on autopilot to cruise slowly around town.
It was 2 o'clock on the dot, and the night was quiet like every other night for the past two weeks. Even at the typically most active hours—12 to 4 am—there wasn't a whisper of activity.
But she had to stay vigilant. They were all lulled into a false sense of security by the dome, and well, look how that turned out.
She sighed. Jesus, she was never going to be able to relax after that. Plus, she had the monster that tore down the dome on a leash: Dan Phantom, scourge of Amity Park.
Why was this her life? Why did she have to be the one to protect the entire town? And she never even graduated from fucking high school. Well, that wasn't completely true. She had her GED, but she had dropped out her junior year. She tried to go back to school once it was rebuilt, but it became apparent that she couldn't keep up with school and fight Phantom.
The first two years were the worst. Dan had been furious and wild after the dome came down, and he made sure that Valerie paid for it. He didn't play around when he showed up. He destroyed and killed, and he hurt her, sometimes very badly. Her shoulder was permanently fucked up after one fight when she was sixteen. She realized then, that he really could kill her if he wanted to. Instead, his scarcely controlled rage tormented her mind and body.
The only way she could bring herself to go out and face him was to lie to herself every time.
If he could kill me, then he would have already done it.
Everything about her life was a lie.
Valerie put her head in her hands. She wondered if anyone could relate to the position she was in. Well, Danny could...
He probably thought the same thing, or something similar.
"Why me? I'm not even out of high school!"
She chuckled hollowly. "God, what a life. I am so, so sorry Danny..."
That's why it was her. Because she was partially responsible for all of this.
She sighed and dry washed her face. Another dangerous line of thought. She couldn't think like that. Even if she was responsible, she's paid for it twice over now. She's done her time, and she's the warden now.
"Still feels like the other way around though," she mused out loud.
Her thoughts circled around and around for the next two hours. She wished for a blip on her tracker, anything, even a level 0 would be nice, but it was predictably silent. Sometimes she enjoyed quiet nights. It gave her time to just look up at the stars, which she rarely had time for otherwise. But at times when there was a lot on her mind, getting a quiet night like this was the worst thing that could happen.
Finally, the little alarm to tell her her shift was up went off. She was relieved for a second before she realized she was only trading sitting outside alone and thinking, for laying in her bed alone and thinking, the latter of which was objectively worse. It was now four in the morning and she was tired, but she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep after everything. She couldn't believe that only a few hours ago she had negotiated with the ghost of time over Dan's life—or rather afterlife. It felt like ages ago.
She went back to the compound going through the back gate, retracting her battle suit, and headed towards her room. She'd drop off her board and suit in her room—because she deserved a couple hours without a 20 kilo metal backpack on her shoulders—she'd get something to eat, take a shower, and then maybe she could get some sleep. Probably not, but she could still try.
She started to pull out her key card as she got to her quarters. She paused, card in hand hovering over the slot. Valerie cast a sidelong glance down the hall at the last room. Maybe she should at least check on him. She'd just knock on the door, she told herself. She wouldn't even go in.
And she didn't even know what she would do if he wasn't there. Sound the alarm she supposed. She told herself she was being stupid, but there was a part of her that was sure he had found away to either take off the crown or worked around her orders.
She got up to the door and knocked. He didn't answer. She knocked again a little more insistently and said, "Dan?"
She started to pull out the key card Paulina had given her. "Dan, you better answer me."
She paused another moment and when he still didn't answer, she slid the card into the electronic lock.
"Please, don't be doing anything weird," she muttered to herself.
She opened the door half expecting to find the room destroyed, bed and pillows shredded, and Dan smugly sitting in the middle of it, like a misbehaving dog. Or him simply not there. Instead, he was sprawled out on the mattress, and the overhead light was still on.
Valerie raised an eyebrow and stepped into the room. She walked around the bed to face him. An arm rested under his head and his other fell over the side of the mattress. His shirt was halfway pulled up, exposing a lean muscled back, and his hair was almost completely out of its holder. A few stray hairs straggled over his cheek.
Something squirmed in her stomach at the sight of his face. She always thought that "looking younger in your sleep" was just something that only existed in books, but Dan's face was soft and peaceful, and really did look half a decade younger than it should. And all the anger and malice was hidden away.
Before she realized what she was doing, she moved a stray piece of hair behind his ear. As soon as her fingers brushed his skin, his eyes shot open. They were bright scarlet.
Valerie jumped back, expecting some sort of attack, but to her surprise, Dan jolted away from her, as well. They both stared at each other for several seconds, wide eyed, and Valerie could feel her cheeks heating.
Finally, she cleared her throat and straightened. "Sorry," she muttered as she stood.
Dan frowned and sat up. "What?"
"I, uh, came in here to check on you—"
"No, why did you apologize?" he said, pinning her with a keen look.
She could feel herself growing even redder. "I didn't mean to wake you up."
His frown deepened. "What were you doing to me while I was asleep?"
She let out a sharp sigh. "I just came in here to check on you," she repeated herself more firmly this time.
Dan raised an eyebrow and threw his legs over the side of the bed. Looking up at her, he tilted his head to the side and gave her a suggestive look, "Oh, check on me, you say?"
She frowned and took a step back from him. "I just wanted to make sure you didn't destroy the room like a badly trained animal."
He raised an eyebrow, still giving her bedroom eyes. "You're lying. You ordered me not to destroy anything, remember? Or do you doubt the power of your magical MacGuffin?"
Valerie frowned. "No, I—" She cut herself off with a sigh and raised a hand to rub a spot over her eyebrow. "I've just had a long night. I'm starving and I'm tired. I think I'm gonna go now."
She turned to leave. Dan shot up from the bed and blurted, "Wait."
Valerie looked over her shoulder at him with a questioning look.
He scuffed his foot against the ground and started to raise a hand to rub the back of his neck before he stopped himself. It was an uncharacteristic display of awkwardness, and a familiar gesture she had seen Danny do a thousand times.
"Uh, where are you going?" he said trying to recover face.
She turned her full body to face him. "I was going to grab something to eat from the mess hall and then go to bed. Why?"
He hesitated for a second then said, "Can I come?"
Valerie blinked. "Why?" she asked again.
He shrugged. "I'm bored, obviously."
Valerie started to fidget. Clockwork said it would be in their best interest if she tried to "befriend" Dan. Valerie didn't agree, but Phantom seemed to already be doing half the work for her. She was still reluctant to spend any time she didn't absolutely have to with him.
"You were just a sleep. You're not still tired?"
"I don't sleep because I'm tired," he explained tersely.
She sighed and massaged her brow. "Alright, you can come, but try not to act like a maniac."